Wednesday 28 December 2011 06.47 EST
First published on Wednesday 28 December 2011 06.47 EST

Are these hard times for the short story? Perhaps not so very tough: in his introduction to The Best British Short Stories: 2011 Nicholas Royle mentions the increase in UK-based paper and ink publications regularly publishing short fiction and concludes that "there have been harder times for the short story", and I think he's right. In the introduction to the The Granta Book of the African Short Story, meanwhile, Helon Habila notes that across the continent "the internet is today doing what the newspapers and magazines did to the development of the short story in Europe and America at the start of the industrial age".

You won't find any internet-only publications below, simply because this year, all my time was taken up with reading traditionally published collections. And despite having read about 80 of those (a significant number of which were for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story award, of which I was a judge) there are still collections I haven't had time for. If anyone has recommendations, online and off, it would be great to see them in the comments section.

Next year is being touted by some as "the year of the short story". Any extra attention is welcome, of course, but I think the list below shows 2011 was too, if you knew where to look.

Each of the five connected stories in German writer Judith Hermann's third collection (translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo) contains a death. She describes them as "variations on a theme, like a corona around this point". As opposed to Tolstoy, who tends to write from the viewpoint of the dying, Hermann studies those left behind. Her style feels chilly at first, but its small gestures gradually outline a consuming grief.

I was almost put off reading Meyer's collection by "The Case of M", his contribution to this year's Best European Fiction collection (see below). I'm glad I didn't, because when it moves away from twist endings and melodramatic murders "All the Lights" (translated by Katy Derbyshire) contains stories of brilliance. "In the Aisles" sees Meyer's Hemingwayesque prose explore the lives of late-night shelf-stackers in Leipzig with marked grace, while in "Little Death" he manipulates time with a fluency more readily associated with film.

Don DeLillo hasn't published many short stories in his career – this slim volume contains nearly all of them since 1979 – but these are anything but downtime daubings. His sleek, weaponised prose, which calmly engineers feverish states and endeavours to sustain them, is well suited to the intensity of the short form. From the Ballardian science fiction of "Human Moments in World War III" to his terrorist masterpiece "Baader-Meinhof", DeLillo's urgent bulletins arrive, like calamity in "The Runner", "out of nowhere, out of dreaming space."

Sarah Hall has been praised, rightly and often, for her ability to render nature in prose. The best stories in this, her debut collection – "Butcher's Perfume", "She Murdered Moral He", "Vuotjärvi" – all feature landscape as a significant presence. Animals recur, a mirror to the bestial in each of us: horses, a dog, a fox with "fur like a furnace". Hall's lyricism is sinewy, and she brings great drama to those periods where things slide unexpectedly into crisis.

Now in its third year, the Best European Fiction series can be relied on to introduce at least a few writers that many Anglophone readers might never have heard of, let alone read. Among those I'm thankful to have been made aware of is Swiss-French Noëlle Revaz, the late Flemish writer Patricia de Martelaere, and the Catalonian Pep Puig, whose coming of age story "Clara Bou" (translated by Jan Reinhart) can't be shaken.

Tireless anthologist Nicholas Royle resurrects an erstwhile Heinemann series, dormant since 1994. Lee Rourke's "Emergency Exit" and Alan Beard's "Staff Development" interrogate office life. Hilary Mantel's "Comma" seems like a horror story, only to transform into something much sadder. Philip Langeskov's "Notes on a Love Story" is Sebaldian in the way it shimmers between story, essay and documentary fragment. Let's hope this series becomes an annual fixture.

In his introduction Habila asks, "How can you 'anthologise' 53 countries, a billion people and over a thousand ethnic groups?" The "African short story" turns out, of course, to be as diverse and indefinable as any other variety. Brian Chikwava mines comedy and beauty from an extortive relationship in modern Harare, while another Zimbabwean, Dambudzo Marachera, recounts an ugly experience at Oxford in the 1970s. In Binyavanga Wainaina's "Ships High in Transit", a tour guide reads Marachera, "who understood the chaos, understood how no narrative gets this continent".

Swedish writer Mirja Unge, translated here by Kari Dickson, often focuses on young women moving uncertainly into adulthood. Their voices run on and on in conjunction-packed sentences, at once breathless and bored and panicked. Unge can do a lot with a little. "Oranges" and "My Bruv's Had Enough" use single scenes to explore broken families and the sorrowful frustrations of mental illness, while the more expansive "The Attic" and "Norrgården" describe menacing power relations between strangers.

If you haven't read Barry Hannah, stop reading this and go and read Barry Hannah. Spanning the period from 1978's stunning "Airships" to the uncollected stories written between "High Lonesome" (1996) and his death in 2010, this collection captures Hannah's obsessions with war (his Civil War and Vietnam stories are indelible), sex, and the troubling legacy of the American South. From the stripped-back energy of his earlier work, edited by Gordon Lish, to the density of the late pieces, a wild poetry streaks it all.

Edna O'Brien's Frank O'Connor award-winning collection engages lustily with the scars and tangles of love, family and politics. "Shovel Kings" explores exile through the story of an Irish ex-navvy dwindling away in north London pubs; "Inner Cowboy" is both an affecting character study and a muscular swipe at the greed engendered by the Celtic Tiger; "Old Wounds" details the rekindling and disintegration of the relationship between elderly cousins. Knotted with wisdom and the painful lessons taught by life, the book's greatest pleasure is its mixing of the elegiac with the sharp and salty.

Set in the Israeli village of Tel Ilan, these bleak, strange stories (translated by Nicholas de Lange) work their fingers deeply into myth, politics and art. Claire Messud has pointed out a connection with Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio; Oz's characters are certainly similarly isolated. Surreality infiltrates Tel Ilan, too, from a bizarrely intrusive guest to a man's search through the deserted, misty village for his wife. Redolent of Kafka, Oz's stories present a prosaic world tilted into strangeness, where small details – cypresses shrouded in mist – become compelling symbols. If I recommended only one collection this year, it would be this one.

Dovlatov's work, pitched somewhere between memoirs, sketches and stories, has been ill-served in his adoptive home of America since his death in 1990, aged 48, and all but non-existent in the UK. One World gamely describes "The Suitcase" as a novel, but it's a collection of stories linked by the contents of the suitcase Dovlatov (Dovlatov's main character is always Dovlatov) packed when he was expelled from the USSR in 1979. His manically funny, deceptively simple style is on intimate terms with life's bleak comedy.

Applying a relentless logic to fantastical scenarios, Millhauser often lands somewhere between Borges and Bradbury. Among the new stories, "The Slap", in which a mysterious assailant strikes random members of a small, affluent town, offers an allegory of post-9/11 America, while the dissection of consumer capitalism in "The Next Thing" is surreal and psychologically acute. An older story, "Eisenheim the Illusionist", is an involving study of what it means both to create and consume art; until the next interpretation comes along, at least. This collection is a perfect introduction to a modern master who should be better known in the UK.